As usual my poll answers reflect the past year or so. For lossless I totally moved away from WavPack and TAK, in favour of Flac. There is no quality difference between lossless codecs so it's only practical usability that lead me to that.

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I moved away from monkey's audio ape, to FLAC, tried a little bit wavpack, decided for FLAC forever, all years, hmmm, decades ago

FLAC is the only thing, because it's the real thing

In the meantime over the years I met lots of people, audiofools, audiophiles.the fools can have crap "HiFi", or can have High-End systems,but the audiophiles can also have crap-systems or High-End-systems.

It is interesting. There are simply different ways of "listening" music. And there are things, not everybody has knowledge of. And not everybody will hear or understand or enjoy or want to enjoy.People are different.And music is different, and even the same song can be experienced in various ways, simply said: by brain or by stomach.

oki, bit OT, but at change of year, let's have had a bit of rethinking.

Disclaimer: Here comes a boring story that offers no definable answers to the poll! Hey, it was a lot longer before I pruned it. Posting in case someone might be vaguely entertained by it.

Way back when, I ripped to WavPack images with embedded cue sheets, transcoded (after tinkering with a few other formats) to LAME -V2 (what else? ), and eventually abandoned lossless. Then I got an iPod and ended up using AAC at 256 kbps (iTunes Plus) for new/other CDs. Concluding that CDs are mostly pointless in being ripped once then shelved forevermore (tenuous legality notwithstanding!), I moved to digital downloads: mostly on iTunes and thus AAC (256 or 128 kbps) again, eventually migrating towards Amazon MP3 once it finally reached the UK, and mixing in a few other MP3-based services (Play.com, some good small one whose name I canít recall, etc.).

In retrospect, I donít know why I moved to AAC there. Once I actually thought about it, I became concerned about compatibility with future DAPs. Iím not worried much nowadays, as it seems to be supported as standard by any decent device, but it would have made more sense to stick with MP3. If nothing else, I kinda liked the more DIY experience of ripping and encoding with LAME, yíknow?

I very rarely buy music now. Iíd like change that, but I donít know in which form. Part of me might like to start picking up CDs againóalbeit more discerningly!óbut I have the same concerns. Standard inclusion of digital booklets with downloads would largely remove the question, but only a shrinking minority provide this. Still, a move back to physical media is unlikely. Iíll probably stick to buying MP3, at least until the advent of a store offering a large catalogue in lossless. As for lossless formats, Iím unconcerned about every last bit of compression, so Iíd probably chooe FLAC due to its relative dominance in terms of hardware support (not that Iíd rule out trying Rockbox). I might one day sort my library out and go back to a proper player like foobar2000 (after going back to Windows, for the software library / convenience).

edit: damn voted wrong on the last question. one file per track it should be.

CUE are not completely recognized by all audio players, and, if we navigate in the directory we immediately see and select the desired track.And for the audio editing is more practical to manipulate one track per time.

A little change to the subject. I found out that my Boxee Box plays Apple Lossless out of the box... so using FLAC in my Apple-minded environment is a bit dull. So the one and only codec I'm using at the moment is ALAC.

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probably ripping & encoding questions are a kind of dull these days, as the trend shows also,storage isn't a problem anymore, even portable.Quality ?For portable in cars, sports, outdoors, even mp3 by lame in V5 is sufficient since years and universal usable.For home HiFi/High-End:No question, Lossless.And here it is dull to discuss format, because of the abilities of Loslsess, transcoding there and back no problems, no quality question.Quantity question ?No, few percent, don't matter, storage space is big and priceworthy.So it comes down to universal compatibility, and obviously people decided since long time, FLAC.Even other formats no problem, Lossless is Lossless is Lossless.

Probably not much interest anymore, who cares, which codec outperformes by few kbit/s in <100 kbit/s lossy area, if many people are satisfied by mp3 lame 128 k, so maybe this forum is mostly interesting for developers, not so much anymore for normal music listeners, consumers.

Maybe reason for decreasing voters in these polls ?

Maybe most music people have more interest, which master/remaster, CD/Vinyl/SACD/DVD-A/medium of a specific album sounds better.Here people get the technical answer, CD well mastered should be great enough, problem is real world behaviour, lots of CDs have "varying" mastering...

It would be interesting to learn what the split between lossless and lossy is, if you have 90% in lossless and 10% in lossy then there is no way to ascertain as both would be checked on the poll.

That might be interesting to know, but only in respect to one's 'main' library for home listening, where disk space considerations are much less of a factor. I think a good many people these days keep lossy files only for portable players. If I had portable players that offered, say, 1TB of storage I'd do away with lossless encoding entirely.

As for lossless formats, Iím unconcerned about every last bit of compression, so Iíd probably chooe FLAC due to its relative dominance in terms of hardware support (not that Iíd rule out trying Rockbox).

Maybe I misunderstood the last part, but Rockbox supports FLAC on all of the platforms that I've run it on. Of course Rockbox is primarily intended for use on portable devices, so you're back to the storage space challenge, which tends to favor the use of lossy formats.

The title of this poll made it seem like the ripper of choice would be voted too. I just had a great success story using Cuetools with a particular optical drive where I successful read-through a CD that took damage over 16 years ago and never played correct since. Over the years I attempted to rip this CD without errors. Of course, this CD is rather unknown and out of print (despite the producer was Jack Endino) and there was no known Accur-rip data was submitted until recently (by myself) but it's fair to say I think I finally got it right. Not sure why EAC gave-up easily but usually my CD's are not subjected to accidental falls onto rough surfaces.

Gotta love TAK -p4m for CD archival and Wavpack for studio tracks (for the float aspect) and I'm pretty happy about not sticking to one-format-for-all. Makes me a better nerd to have a bunch of formats kicking around my listening areas

I started out using WAV+cue but I ended up using FLAC+single file per track as my scheme (it just worked out better for me that way). I listen using Foobar2000 on Windows or MPD on Arch Linux. I use shell scripts to convert tracks to MP3 when needed (a PowerShell script when using Windows 7 or a Bash script when using Arch Linux).

Lossy: mainly OGG Vorbis -5 because both my Samsung Galaxy S II and Sansa Clip+ supports this format and it's a nice format since it's opensource and have very high quality. My second choice is LAME -V2 or -V0, but I recently bought an iPad 2 16GB and for him I use qaac -80, that sounds great anyway.

Lossless: FLAC. My library use very different combinations, but mostly FLAC -8 or FLAKE -8. I want to reconvert everything to FLAKE ou FLACCL -8, but need some HDD space for that.